I’m the technical content owner for TechEd 2006 Oz SQL Data and Business Intelligence and thanks to the SQL MVPs and other SQL/BI gurus (thanks guys!!) I’ve put together an initial ranked list of sessions we’d like to see running at TechEd 2006 in Sydney (dependent on speaker availability etc).

You can see the complete list of sessions for this track attached to the end of blog item, please feel free to pick it over and either send me feedback via my blog or add a comment to this blog entry. Your feedback will be most appreciated and will help shape TechEd 2006 to be the event you want it to be.

In this session we will look at a fast-paced collection of indexing tips and tricks based on an already optimized base table structure. How you create your base table – as well as cluster it – has a big impact on that table’s performance. To mix learning options and give you a lot more advanced content, this session should be attended AFTER viewing Part 4 of the MSDN Webcast Series titled: Effectively Designing a Scalable and Reliable Database. The complete set of resources for Part 4 can be found here: http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032278595&EventCategory=5&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US. Once the base table structures have been defined and you have to further improve system performance, where do you look and how do you do this? In this session we will talk about targeting both the known and finding the unknown performance problems. Once you know where the problems are we’ll go through numerous options to improve the performance using indexes. This session is very fast-paced with a lot of tips and tricks for various search arguments (SARGs), aggregations, and joins. Additionally, this session will look at a couple of design techniques that help to improve both performance and availability by leveraging new SQL Server 2005 features. Once this session has been completed you will want to watch Part 5 of the same series. Part 5 covers Index Maintenance and completes the indexing series from Table Creation to Indexing Strategies to Index Maintenance. You can see a complete set of resources for this series in a summary entry on Kimberly’s blog here: http://www.sqlskills.com/blogs/kimberly/PermaLink.aspx?guid=4daca6d9-c52b-4f85-a47c-20f252883e20.

T2244

DAT

Query Tuning in SQL Server 2005

“This lab will guide you through some common query performance tuning exercises including troubleshooting deadlocks, query plans and using the Database Tuning Advisor. You will learn how to use the various tools provided with SQL Server 2005 to effectively troubleshoot and tune queries in SQL Server. This lab requires prior experience with basic administration in SQL Server 2000, familiarity with T-SQL and have familiarity with SQL Server 2005 Workbench or completed the lab on SQL Server Workbench.”

T524F

DAT

Consolidation with SQL Server 2005: Lessons Learned and Best Practices

Server Consolidation has been pursued for years, yet few companies have been truly successful when it comes to database consolidation. Come find out some of the most common reasons for failures and learn the recipe for a successful server consolidation project. Find out why some of the most successful consolidation projects actually increase IT expenses, yet make the customers perfectly happy. This session provides insight into the right motivations for consolidation, critical success factors, often overlooked risks, and key technologies in SQL Server 2005 that aid in the process. It also covers issues related to infrastructure, servers and storage. Finally, the session presents proven techniques and best practices that you may adopt in your own consolidation project.

T0885

DAT

Database Maintenance in SQL Server 2005

This session covers the essential parts of SQL Server that, as a DBA, you need to be aware of to maintain a healthy database. See what type of jobs you should be scheduling and why. It is extremely important to understand not only what these tasks actually do from a maintenance standpoint but from multi-user and performance impact as well. We cover how often and when each of these should be scheduled. If you are not 100% sure what your server needs in terms of maintenance you need to attend this session.

TBC34

DAT

SQL Server 2005 Table and Index Partitioning

“SQL Server 2005 Table and Index Partitioning allows you to create larger, more manageable tables where periodic large loads and large archiving deletes occur. Known as the sliding window scenario actively manipulating a single, large table with multiple indexes can be time consuming and create a lot of blocking. With SQL Server 2005 Table Partitioning, you can work with a “”partition”” outside of the bounds of the large data set. In this lab, you will get a feel for when to create, how to define, and how to manage the sliding window scenario using the new SQL Server 2005 Partitioned Tables feature. This exercise includes best practices and tips for why you should choose right-based partition functions and how to ensure that the sliding window scenario is optimal by now causing record relocation. This lab requires prior experience with basic table and index administration in SQL Server 2000. This lab is about 90 minutes to complete.”

T3690

DAT

SQL Server 2005: Best Practices in Building Robust, Recoverable and Reliable Systems

This session highlights key concepts, features and best practices from the TechNet series titled: SQL Server 2005 for the IT Professional, delivered during the three months prior to Techâ€¢Ed. In March, April and May, we discussed many facets of recovery and reliability for SQL Server 2005. This session hits the highlights and reminds you of what you should be looking for in order to provide a robust environment where data loss is reduced as much as your design (and budget) allows. This session is all about tips and tricks – from Update/Installation to Security, Tools, Availability, and Recovery from Human Error. If you want to how how to design the foundation for a robust and reliable system, this session is for you!

T5447

DAT

SQL Server 2005 Database Mirroring

“Database mirroring in SQL Server 2005 enhances system availability by providing options for a secondary database to takeover – either automatically or manually – in the event of disaster to a primary server. This lab will walk you through the setup and configuration required to design a Database Mirror pair setup in the High Availability configuration as well as describe the alternate High Protection and High Performance configurations. The objective of this lab is to teach you how to appropriately configure Database Mirroring for the desired level of availability as well as show you a scenario where database mirroring can provide rapid resumption of work on a mirror database server should the primary fail. This lab requires prior experience with basic administration in SQL Server 2000, and familiarity with general high availability and failover protection concepts.”

T6851

DAT

SQL Server Error Handling: T-SQL, SQL CLR and Clients

In SQL Server 2005, both T-SQL and SQLCLR procedures can use Try-Catch constructs to intercept and process exceptional conditions. This is a big change for both server and client/middle-tier processing, as client and middle-tier received and processed all errors directly from SQL Server. In addition, both T-SQL and SQLCLR error handling don’t catch every type of error or allow the ability to directly rethrow all errors to reproduce SQL Server 2005 behavior. In this session, I’ll look at how the mechanism in depth and attempt to provide a comprehensive and consistant error handling strategy that works for all procedural code and clients.

T6ACD

DAT

Methodology for Upgrading to SQL Server 2005

The SQL Server 2005 upgrade involves more than just running the Upgrade Advisor. This session examines how to construct a methodology, what techniques you can use to upgrade to SQL Server 2005 and the necessary pre-upgrade and post-upgrade considerations. The session will conclude with how you can refactor your database to take immediate advantage of SQL Server 2005’s features with minimal impact on your database solutions.

More and more data that does not fit into the relational model directly such as semi-structured and unstructured data is stored inside the database. SQL Server 2005 provides several improvements that make the management of such data easier and more efficient than ever. This presentation will show how XML, varbinary(max), CLR-based user-defined functions and fulltext search will enable you to store and manage your semi-structured and unstructured data along with your traditional, relational data.

TBE67

DAT

Using SQL Server Service Broker As a Batch Scheduling Tool

Most people think of Service Broker as a reliable messaging system, but the combination of dialogs, activation and conversation timers make it suitable for developing batch scheduling applications. This session walks you through using Service Broker to implement a reliable, distributed batch scheduling system using Service Broker.

It’s easy to use Integration Services to build a package to move data from Here to There. But to build a system of packages that professionally, and consistently, manage your dimensional data warehouse, you need to be able to use a lot of the great features in SSIS. This session illustrates best practices for building a realistic ETL system, including communicating between master and child packages, using dynamic SQL in the Data Flow, and when and how to use the Script Task and Script Transform. Auditing and logging are key elements of a professional ETL system, and we talk about how to supplement the standard SSIS logging with additional process metadata. The ETL process is at the end of a long, dirty pipeline. Learn how to design flexible systems that detect the most common errors before it’s too late, and plan for the worst case “oops, it’s too late” scenarios.

T07A8

BIN

SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services: Advanced Report Design

Want to get beyond the basics? This session presents advanced techniques for building reports with SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services and the Visual Studio-based Report Designer. We tackle topics such as how to use the report expression language, report parameterization (data driven, multi-valued, and hierarchical), supporting multiple data sources (including relational, model based, multi-dimensional, and XML), and report interactivity (end user sort, drill down, and drillthrough). See the new features available to report designers in SQL Server 2005 along with walk-throughs of sample reports and tips and tricks for using the Report Definition Language (RDL).

Do your users require self-service reporting? Are you ready to move forward with Report Builder but unsure of how to build a robust Report Model to enable end-user independence? Have you built Report Models but need to know how to move to the next level or solve design issues? This session provides prescriptive guidance about using the new Model Designer to build robust Report Models that will facilitate diverse reporting needs and overall yield better reports. Gain a better understanding of model auto-generation and the manual steps of model design and editing. Leave with a greater confidence in Report Model design concepts and allowing you to deploy Report Builder widely in your organization.

SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services is a complete re-architecture relative to SQL Server 2000, with a strong emphasis on enterprise readiness. In this presentation, we discuss the scalability and performance aspects of the Analysis Services architecture and feature set (dimension storage, memory management, processing, proactive caching, partitioning, aggregation design). We also talk about common pitfalls and provide best practices for producing optimal UDM design.